Many businesses employ a number of attendant agents, for example, reservation agents, to answer customer inquiries. Modern telecommunication switching systems automatically perform many of the functions required for completing customer calls to the attendant agents. Each such agent serves calls routed to that agent's terminal equipment called an agent position. A group of such agent positions is commonly associated in an automatic call distribution (ACD) system, which is frequently controlled from the telecommunication system, in which incoming customer calls are allocated to individual agent positions as they become available.
In one prior art system, a telecommunication switching system connected to one or more agent positions includes a switching network and a control processor. The control processor controls the setup of a voice path including a voice connection through the switching network between an incoming port connected to a customer station and a selected one of the group of agent positions of the automatic call distribution system. The agent at the agent position may have access to a data base from his position through a data path using a data connection. For example, the agent may be a reservation agent for an airline who has access via his terminal and a data channel to the airline reservation system data base.
The agent typically accumulates data concerning a customer's requests by voice communication with a customer and keys this data into a video display terminal at the agent position. The agent then communicates via a data path with a data base which responds with information that is displayed at the agent's video display terminal. Using the displayed information, the agent then communicates further with the customer via the voice path and, if appropriate, enters and confirms a reservation into the reservations data base via the data path.
In the prior art, display and control data has been sent over a separate data path to the data base. The use of such a separate path makes it costly to locate the agents far away from the data base with which they communicate. In some systems, expensive special facilities are required to assemble and distribute data from many agent positions for communication to a remote data base. In prior systems, it is also expensive and inconvenient for the agent to communicate with several data bases; this might be required, for example, for a travel agent who must deal with hotel, car rental, and airline reservations.
A recognized problem in the art, therefore, is the absence of an economic access system to permit an agent to have voice communications with a customer while rapidly accessing a plurality of remote data bases for responding to that customer's requests.